Raising the Bar: $500/day is my goal.

Come along for the ride. We can all learn something.

[momotan]

I started AM marketing by accident a couple months ago. I started a free service a few months back and pumped some adwords money into it to get it rolling. In a few weeks, my adsense earnings doubled the adwords spend and it has held steady. Then i figured what can i do to bring more money from my free service. I signed up for some affiliate programs my users may like and added links. They did ok. Then i decided, maybe if I added a web page rather than a link for the affiliate product it would do better and it did. However, I also was running adsense on that page and noticed it got most of the clicks. I removed adsense for that page and suddenly my revenue went to 5 times the combined adsense/affiliate earnings. The light in the head went off and i added some low cost adwords traffic to that page to supplement the traffic from my free service which was less targeted that the adwords traffic and the earnings doubled. Clearly I was on to something. The next bit of good news was that Yahoo indexed the page and put it at #11 for it's main keyword. I read up on SEO and did a little basic SEO to the page (H1 tags, alt image, etc) and it popped to #1. It didn't add much revenue because it only gets 8-10 click throughs a day but i figured if one page can do that, imagine 100. I have hired a content writer off elance to create said 100 pages of original SEO'd content to see what a full blown site will do.

Right now I stand at $40-$50 a day of Net revenue. Any suggestions to take this thing to the moon?

[wsp9]

Congratulations on building up some nice momentum. The best thing you can do is to just keep adding more content. That will sustain traffic more than anything else and try getting some links to authority sites. That will boost google page rank which will boost traffic. The best authority sites from my limited amount of experience are accredited universities. You link your site up to that and then you'll have your own authority site and you're golden.

[momotan]

Thanks for the praise. I don't think any of my stuff would go along well with universities. Any other "authority" sites i should look at?

[wsp9]

I think you have to look at it differently. Don't think about what your existing sites are all about and how they won't fit in. Think about a future site. Create one that incorporates something you know about and would fit in nicely on the resource page for the department of history(for example) on the Harvard Univeristy website. These univeristy sites are monstrous and have high page rank to boot. Most have dozens of different departments each with their own area of the website. You get one site linked to the resource page on the university site and then all your other money-making sites link off of that one. It's really that simple. Some people post about $300 a day and limit themselves to that and get other people suckered into it as well. Forget that nonsense. Think about traffic, traffic, traffic. That's the bottom line on the internet and that will take you way beyond $300 a day.

[Erku]

Help me please, what is AM marketing?

Thank you.

[David Bowley]

Not sure if this is a joke, but anyway, simply it's short for Affiliate Marketing and it involves being an affiliate for a merchant, whereby you recommend and get people to go to the merchant's site to buy (with your tracking idea) and you get a % of the sale.

I imaagine there is a whole lot more ways to explain it than that but that's how I see it.

[rfung]

Some people post about $300 a day and limit themselves to that and get other people suckered into it as well. Forget that nonsense. Think about traffic, traffic, traffic. That's the bottom line on the internet and that will take you way beyond $300 a day.

...like anything in life you have to set goals, and there's nothing wrong with a $300/day - before it was $100/day, and after it will be $1000/day. If you make more than that, congrats, but you didn't just one day decide to do AM/AS and the next you were rolling in dough. It's a moving target that you set yourself as you go along and grow, just like today you may set yourself up to run 100 meters, and tomorrow one mile, with the final goal of running a marathon.

To say it's a nonsense and limiting is the only real nonsense here.

[zivkovicp]

rfung is right. Affiliate Marketing is a roller coaster ride, especially if you depend on it as your primary income source.

I've been doing AM for years and I've been through tough times where I would make only a few dollars per months and high times of $800/day... it depends on many factors, one of which is setting your goals and working towards them.

As you meet your goals, you'll set new ones and so on. Don't get discouraged, it takes time, patience and the work is NEVER finished. :)

good luck with your website!

[momotan]

It's going pretty well thus far. Because I have new sites, the SEO part is taking time. Mainly the indexing. I tried the my yahoo index trick but no visit from slurp yet for the remainder of the site. It just picked up that one page that is doing well. I have a good mix now. AM through SEM/PPC, AM through SEO and a free service that is growing by word of mouth and is supplying decent Adsense income.